


Smoke and Mirrors

by a_walking_shadow



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: (pls don't literally fight me), 13 is a Very Dark Doctor, And anyone who disagrees can fight me, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-10-14 11:56:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17508173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_walking_shadow/pseuds/a_walking_shadow
Summary: The TARDIS lands on a planet, and something attacks the Doctor.No, wait-The TARDIS lands on a planet, and something attacks Graham.No, wait-The TARDIS lands on a planet, and something attacks Yaz.No, wait-the TARDIS lands on a planet, and the Doctor attacks something.





	Smoke and Mirrors

‘Where are we, Doc?’

‘Not sure, Graham. The TARDIS couldn’t get a proper fix on the coordinates of this place, almost like it wasn’t entirely here, y’know?’

‘Not entirely here? What’s that supposed to mean?’

She shrugs. ‘Not a clue. Should be interesting, though. Come along, gang!’

 

Sharing a slightly nervous glance, they begin to follow the Doctor over the hill. The grass beneath their feet is an odd purple shade.

‘That’s interesting. Very, very interesting. Purple plants are pretty common. Well, not as common as green ones, but still, on a universal scale, they’re definitely more common than a lot of others. Silver! There are only a couple planets in the universe with silver plants, you know that? The leaves are too shiny to absorb light. Instead, most of the silver leaves feed on other stuff. Psychic energy, oh, that was a fun one. Temporal energy, in a few cases. Purple though- well, purple’s easy, isn’t it? It’s just green but for more light! Not here, though. Those stars are too far away for this to make any sense. I wonder… unless, no, that would mean-’

 Ryan rolls his eyes slightly at the Doctor’s antics, watching as she scrambles the last few steps to the top of the hill.

And stops.

The world drops away from them- sheer cliff face- too sheer, too straight, unnaturally so. Eventually, after what must be several miles, the view dissolves into smoke.  
Staring out at the horizon is the same- miles of emptiness, tendrils of smoke just beginning to rise to their elevation, and then nothing. Like they’ve hit the end of everything, here be dragons, go no further or you’ll fall off the end of the world.

For once, the Doctor is silent. Ryan risks a glance in her direction. She looks as shocked as he feels. Then, cautiously, she begins to raise her sonic.

No sooner has she activated it than the smoke _shifts_ , a writhing, insubstantial mass that surges in their direction with all the subtlety of a tidal wave. It slams into the cliff below them, and begins climbing, all illusions of being regular smoke well and truly dispelled. The movement, rather than an animal or human scaling a wall, almost resembles a plant, a creeper vine surging skywards at the expense of its host. The thickest tendril is spiralling towards the Doctor, propelled by the swirling mass underneath.

The thing is still several yards below them when the Doctor stumbles, crying out, grabbing her head. Ryan, Graham and Yaz all instinctively reach out, dragging her back from the cliff face. Except, as soon as they make physical contact they can feel it too, fire and rage and hatred and cruelty and loneliness and longing, childish cruelty and ancient, unnameable fury.

Yaz collapses to her knees in the face of it, feels whatever it is tear through her thoughts, watches the last vestiges of her sanity crumble with a kind of detached curiosity…

‘Oh, don’t you _dare_ ’, the Doctor growls…

… and the world _twists._

* * *

 

‘Where are we, Doc?’

‘Not sure, Graham. The TARDIS couldn’t get a proper fix on the coordinates of this place, almost like it wasn’t entirely here, y’know?’

‘Not entirely here? What’s that supposed to mean?’

She shrugs. ‘Not a clue. Should be interesting, though. Come along, gang!’

 

The Doctor bends down, reaching for a handful of soil, but a moment later her hands are diverted to the small, grass-like plants growing all over the field they stand in.

‘Hmm, fractal! Fractal life forms are surprisingly rare, actually. Easy bauplan, but not exactly the most adaptable, they tend to be outcompeted the moment anything more complex evolves. We must be here very early on in the evolutionary history of this place. Wherever ‘this’ actually is…’

The Doctor shifts her grip on the plant slightly and it crumbles to ash between her fingers. She frowns, but begins striding up the hill regardless.

She’s almost reached the crest before she realises she already knows what’s going to be on the side, and slows her pace, wondering- 

The smoke is already curling over the edge of the cliff, swirling around their ankles and pooling in the irregular hollows left by the not-grass. There are shapes moving in the smoke, far too distant to make out yet far too close for comfort.

The Doctor turns, slowly, staring in fascination at the inky mass eddying at their feet. She reaches into a pocket, drawing out her sonic-

Curious, Yaz lowers herself to one knee and slips a hand into the smoke, wondering if it will run like water between her fingers-

Stumbling on a rock, Ryan instinctively reaches out to catch himself-

Graham, a little further back than the others, as yet oblivious to the smoke, reaches down for one of the plants the Doc had picked up earlier-

The future fractures, neatly, once, twice, thrice. Four realities, each equally true, spiralling off through a myriad of dimensions.

She considers them, one by one, like she has all the time in the universe, and when time tries to disagree she tells it to stop that and it does, briefly, but-   
Four futures spin away from her, too complex to read, except she already knows the price of one of them, so-

Graham, a little further back than the others, as yet oblivious to the smoke, reaches down for one of the plants the Doc had picked up earlier, and gets a handful of smoke instead.

He does not cry out, for all that this is his turn.

Ryan feels himself sinking, adrift in an ocean. Alone. Currents tugging him in a thousand directions at once, and he’s just so tired, what’s the point, why fight it-

Grief drags him under. And as soon as Ryan goes, Graham does too.

‘You’ll have to do better than that,’ she hisses, straightening her shoulders and letting the onslaught slam, uselessly, against her psychic shields.

For a moment, she has won. The Doctor grins down at it, secure in the knowledge that all her human friends are too far gone to see the vicious glint in her eyes. The smoke curls back on itself, quivering, leaving her standing in a perfect circle of bare ground…

… and the world _twists._

 

* * *

 

‘Not exactly a lively place,’ Yaz comments, staring in horror-tinged awe at the burned fields surrounding the TARDIS.

The Doctor steps out, feeling long-dead plants crunch under her boots. She doesn’t reply. Something tells her that this day is going to be a long one, probably quite literally.

Smoke is rising around them. For now, it does a decent job of approximating actual smoke. The Doctor sighs.

‘Get on with it, then.’

‘Get on with what? Doctor, what’s-’

The smoke curls around Yaz’s wrists, and they are in freefall. Spiralling out of control, nothing to do about it, no way to help, like a piece of paper caught in a hurricane. Surrounded on all sides by the uncontrollable with no way out.

 

‘Of course.’

The wind howls, snatches her words the moment they leave her lips. ‘Of course it would be. The police officer in training, always looking for a way to help. To make things better. Of course she’s hiding how lost she feels with all this.’

The Doctor takes a few steps forward, although it feels like wading through treacle. ‘Because that’s what you are, isn’t it? Not anything special, are you? Just an echo.’ She’s shouting, now, for all that it matters, the smoke curling around her lips, tearing at the back of her throat and it’s a struggle to keep breathing. ‘A cheap trick, amplifying what we’re hiding. You’re nothing. Just smoke and mirrors, oh, I’ve met street magicians with more talent than you. Ones who convince the audience they’ve created something out of nothing. You can’t even do that much, can you?’

The wind dies down a little, and she takes the opportunity to snag a lungful of air. It’s circling her, now, like a shark circling its prey, and it takes an awful lot of willpower not to laugh at just how wrong it has all of this.

She is the only one still standing, and the smoke is curling itself around the other three almost possessively.

‘I don’t think you want to hurt them’, she whispers, although the pressure is beginning to make it hard to speak. ‘I don’t think you want to do that at all. Do you know why?’

The wind pauses. _Tell me,_ the smoke says, not in words but something far more primal.

_I’ll just show you_ , _you pathetic little upstart, did you really think your cheap trick rewriting time would work on me, you only got this far because I was curious, but no, why do I even bother looking for a proper challenge these days_ -

And she reaches out, finds some loose strands of time, and _pulls_.

Yaz lowers herself to one knee, but before she can slip a hand into the smoke pooling around her, something moves in her peripheral vision and she scrambles upright, staring out over the cliff towards somewhere she could’ve sworn she saw movement.

Stumbling on a rock, Ryan instinctively reaches out to catch himself- except Ryan was walking, oh, two feet to the left, so the rock was never there, was it?

Graham calls out ‘wait for me, Doc!’, shaking himself out of a daze and catching up with the others, desperate not to be left behind on an alien planet, not again, so he notices the smoke at the same time as the rest of them.

The Doctor does not draw her sonic. Instead, she pauses at the edge of the cliff, glaring down at the writhing mass beneath her.

‘Cheap tricks, the lot of it,’ she comments, mildly. ‘But those weren’t cheap tricks for you, were they? That’s all you can manage. And I managed to overwrite every one of your little changes with barely a thought.’ The thing buckles at that, angrily, if smoke could be described as moving angrily. ‘You really aren’t the all-powerful god you like to think you are, mate. Control over time? That particular gig was taken a long, long time ago. Now, are you going to play nice, or am I going to have to go searching for some nastier endings for this?’

The thing pauses, for a moment, and she thinks it might just try and fight her- and then-

Then, she presumes, it remembers the rage it had captured from her, twisted and reflected upon itself until it seemed all-powering-

Just in case it still seems to think this is a good idea, she drops her shields, just for a moment. Oh, it’s been so long since she did this.

_Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly…_

It surges in, smoke pouring through the labyrinthine network of passages and rooms which make up her mind, and, once she’s sure it’s nicely settled, she lets it see _exactly_ what it came for.

‘You barely even scratched the surface for that show of yours.’

Armies flee. Planets explode, galaxies consume themselves, races throw themselves into anarchy at her feet like some kind of sacrifice. Gallifrey burns and she stands in the rubble left behind and a small part of her smiles. Gallifrey stands, so she lets it join all the others that gave themselves to chaos for her. Friends die, some quietly, some raging against the end, and, either way, daleks scream as they fall into oblivion and cybermen collapse in a shower of sparks.

 She makes no move to hide her amusement as it slinks away from her like a wounded animal.

‘Now, I get that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I really do. But I think you might have bitten off a little more than you can chew.’

The smoke retreats, settling into the chasm in front of her. By the time Ryan, Graham and Yaz join her at the edge, it looks more like a calm lake or fog-covered valley than the creature she knows it to be.

There’s still the faintest flicker of fear in the air, a feeling of submission which she can almost taste, but the humans aren’t going to be psychic enough to notice it. Hopefully.

The Doctor takes a slightly shaky breath, and drags her shield back up.

‘Come on, fam! I’ve just worked out where we are. Nothing here. Let’s go see something a bit more interesting. There’s this great little café out in the Andromeda galaxy, GalaxyAdvisor says they do the best caramel slice in the universe…’

 


End file.
